Starting from the little reliable information available, Riccarda Suitner conducts an exciting investigation of the authors, production, illustrations, circulation and plagiarism of a series of anonymous "dialogues of the dead" in the intellectual world of the early eighteenth century, proposing a new image of the German Enlightenment.

Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Introduction  1 Cheap Prints, Dialogues of the Dead, Pamphlets: The Anonymous World of the Early 18th-Century German Book Trade  2 The Dialogues of the Dead of the Early German Enlightenment (1729–1734): An Unknown Corpus of Sources 1 From Antiquity to the Enlightenment  1 Lucian of Samosata (c. 120–180/192 CE): The Νεκρικοί διάλογοι  2 Fontenelle: The Nouveaux dialogues des morts (1683)  3 David Fassmann: The Gespräche im Reich der Toten (1718–1739) 2 The Examen Rigorosum  1 The Judgment of Apollo  2 The Business of “Pirated Editions”  3 Student Rivalries 3 The War of the Biographers  1 The Pietist Front: Christian Gerber and the Historia derer Wiedergebohrnen in Sachsen  2 The First Literary Depictions of the Lives of Christian Thomasius and August Hermann Francke  3 The World of the Copper Engravers  4 The Harsh Laws of Competition  5 Eulogies, Dialogues of the Dead, (Auto)Biographies: The “Instability” of Literary Genres 4 The Wolffian Leibniz  1 S. W.  2 The Argument with Johann Franz Budde  3 Eclecticism, the Mathematical Method, Atheism  4 How Many Authors? 5 The Two Faces of Leibniz  1 1745: Leibniz Becomes the Protagonist of a Dialogue of the Dead Once Again  2 The Conversation with Ludwig Philipp Thümmig  3 Gottsched, Mylius, Hagedorn, the “Swiss” Poets: The Disputes of the 1740s 6 The Argument between Descartes and Rüdiger  1 Arriving among the Stars  2 Descartes as a Wolffian Philosopher  3 Pietism and Materialism  4 The Background of the Dialogue  5 Role Play 7 The Restoration of All Things  1 Prefaces to Dialogues of the Dead: The Dialogue between Mayer and Petersen  2 Ἀποκατάστασις πάντων: Origen, Leibniz, and Petersen 8 Balthasar Bekker’s Remorse  1 The Exorcism on Peter Otte  2 Cartesianism and Demonology in 18th-Century Germany  3 The Pact with the Devil  4 More on the Engravers: The Identity of “M. B.”  5 Some Deliberations on the Origin, Authorship, and Dissemination of the Dialogue  6 Necromancy and Conversations in the Realm of Spirits Conclusion  1 The “Underworlds” of the Dialogues of the Dead: Which Level of Clandestineness?  2 Four Reasons for Anonymity  3 “Material” Evidence and Intellectual History  4 The Question of Authorship Bibliography Index